Toby Harnden was the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC, from 2006 to 2011. Click here for Toby's website. Follow him on Twitter here @tobyharnden and on Facebook here. He is the author of the bestselling book Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Defining Story Britain's War in Afghanistan.

Nancy Pelosi goes to war with "lying" CIA

If there is an independent truth commission into the use of alleged torture, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, could find herself in the dock.

After a series of incomplete, belated and apparently contradictory Pelosi accounts of CIA briefings to her and her staff, the big question in Washington today is: What did she know about waterboarding and when did she know it? Former Bush consigliere Karl Rove lays out the charges against her here.

Fighting fire with fire today, Pelosi accused the CIA of lying to Congress as a diversionary tactic to cover up lies about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. The CIA deliberately misleading Congress? That's a federal crime, raising the spectre of another Iran-Contra type affair.

According to the CIA, she was briefed about the Enhanced Interrogation Technique (EIT) on September 4th 2002 along with Porter Goss, then Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. At the time, she was the senior Democrat on the committee.

But the Speaker vehemently denied this at today's tense press conference, accusing the spy agency of 1. lying to her then by saying that water-boarding was not been used and 2. lying now by saying that she was told that detainees were being water-boarded.

She then went for broke by linking the CIA's alleged lie to her in 2002 to a broader cover-up about WMD. "This is exactly the same time, September of 2002…the Bush administration was misleading the American people about the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," she said.

Her most incendiary words were these:

Q: Did you protest that directly to them [the CIA], Madame Speaker?

PELOSI: "They mislead us all the time. I was fighting the war in Iraq at that point too, you know, saying to my members, the intelligence does not support the imminent threat that they are conceiving. But what's the point?

Q: "So they lied to you?"

PELOSI: "Yeah, they did. They misrepresented every step of the way. And they don't want that focus on them, so they try to turn the attention on us."

Watch some of it here:

Appearing nervous and stumbling at times, Pelosi did, however, admit that an aide of hers, Michael Sheehy, was briefed by the CIA in February 2003 that water-boarding was being used and he subsequently informed her.

She had previously neglected to mention that she knew about water-boarding in 2003 and tried to play this down today, saying: "The point is that I wasn't briefed. I was informed that someone else had been briefed about it.

Pelosi's position now appears to be that 1. she was not concerned about water-boarding in September 2002 because although she was told the technique was approved she was told it was not being used and 2. she did not object to water-boarding in 2003 because she was no longer on the Intelligence Committee and had not been personally briefed – and she was busy, er, fighting the Iraq war.

Her successor on the committee, Congresswoman Jane Harman, wrote a letter to the CIA's counsel after the February 2003 briefing, objecting to water-boarding. Pelosi says that it was not her responsibility to object personally because as Democratic minority leader "my job was to change the majority in Congress and to fight to have a new president".

The problem for Pelosi is that everyone else in the briefing – Goss and the CIA briefers – dispute her account. Goss's partiality may be questioned because he subsequently became CIA director but if the CIA does release its briefing notes then Pelosi could be in big trouble.

There seem to be only two possibilities: 1. Pelosi is lying or 2. The CIA and Goss are lying.

A war between the Speaker of the House and the CIA is a major distraction for the Obama administartion and indeed for the United States.

Despite President Barack Obama's suposed determination to "move on" from the Bush years, the dominant topic on the political agenda (apart from Miss California) day after day is interrogation techniques, whether they were illegal and who is responsible.

All this is demoralising for the CIA and others at the sharp end of fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama needs to change the subject, and quickly. Expect a Supreme Court nominee any day now.